Around the time of the 21-state breach, a technician at the Center for Election Systems, the Georgia firm that handles the state’s election data, computers and training, found a hole in the election system’s server that would have allowed anyone to download or alter the database that included every voter in the state. He also found PDF files with the instructions, all the passwords and software files for the system that allowed poll workers to verify registered voters.

Isn’t it comforting that state election officials are treating democracy the same way my grandmother treats her Comcast provided email?

The only logical explanation that could possibly explain why Russians did not change votes in Georgia is to somehow believe an international cabal of hackers got into the system, found instructions, voter registrations and passwords to voting machines and yet somehow decided not to do it, just because.

Marks says Georgia’s systems would have been an “ideal” target for Russian hackers because the state doesn’t use a system with a paper trail so there is no way to audit the system. Of course, a diligent eye could have inspected Georgia’s system or compared the saved backups with the hacked server.

But when Marks’ organization sued for data to see whether or not the state’s elections systems had been penetrated, Kennesaw State University, the college that houses the Center for Election Systems, wiped the servers clean.

Then they wiped the servers’ backups clean.

Oh my god. But wait, it gets worse.

At the 2017 Def Con computer security conference, perhaps the biggest gathering of hackers in the world, organizers challenged attendees to hack into a variety of 30 different voting machines used by election officials around the country.

Within 24 hours they hacked every one.

A 16-year-old hacker broke into as ExpressPoll voting machine used by Georgia in 45 minutes. Another cyberhacker showed how he could change votes in the WINvote machine used in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Mississippi, with only a computer, a mouse and a Microsoft Word document, as long as he had the password. But the hacker soon discovered that WINvote machines all had the same password.

The password, which could not be changed, was (you might want to take a deep breath) “abcde.”

Ok, I’ll stop simply block quoting this whole article, because you just need to read the whole damn thing. Simply put, the vulnerability of electronic voting is the quietest scandal going. I don’t have a doubt in my mind that these vulnerabilities were purposely “back doored” into those machines at the behest of the republican party in order to preserve their tyranny of the minority. Making that back door means those machines are vulnerable to any determined attacker, including the Russians. The real pessimist in me believes they’re also there so that if they lose the election they can roll out all these vulnerabilities that “cost them the election” and demand a do-over.

In the early days of the investigation in March 2017, this is how Devin Nunes – yet to be revealed as a Trump stooge – began a line of questioning.

NUNES: Admiral Rogers, first I wanna go to you. On January 6th, 2017, the intelligence community assessment assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent U.S. elections, stated that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.

NUNES: So my question as of today, Admiral Rogers, do you have any evidence that Russia cyber actors changed vote tallies in the state of Michigan?

ROGERS: No I do not, but I would highlight we are a foreign intelligence organization, not a domestic intelligence organization. So it would be fair to say, we are probably not the best organization to provide a more complete answer.

NUNES: How about the state of Pennsylvania?

ROGERS: No, sir.

NUNES: The state of Wisconsin?

ROGERS: No, sir.

NUNES: State of Florida?

ROGERS: No, sir.

NUNES: The state of North Carolina?

ROGERS: No, sir.

NUNES: The state of Ohio?

ROGERS: No, sir.

NUNES: So — so you have no intelligence that suggests, or evidence that suggests, any votes were changed?

ROGERS: I have nothing generated by the national security industry, sir.

Weird, huh?

The guy flat out says WE ARE NOT THE ORGANIZATION THAT WOULD KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS and Nunes continues the line of questioning anyway so he can get a soundbyte.

A History of Corruption

“I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

The Diebold name became so toxic they had to change the name of the company. It was run by a Republican to elect Republicans. Surely, things have changed since 2003. Nope, here is a map of the manufacture date of voting machines used by each state:

Back to Georgia for a second. Georgia did all of that after its special election where democratic favorite Ossoff lost in a somewhat surprise upset. What was polled to be a relatively close race turned out to be a 4 point win for Handel. The result didn’t match any exit polls either, more on that in a minute. Not outside of the range of possibility but more than a little suspicious and even if it wasn’t, what happened after definitely was.

A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system.

And Brian Kemp, the guy responsible for the voting machines declined federal money to fix them, and is now running for governor. Just take a listen to this fuckwad:

Exit Polls

Exit polls have not matched election results in this country since the 2004 election. There’s something about that time-frame. Oh I remember, 2 years before that, a longtime manufacturer of voting equipment called Premier Elections Solutions was acquired by a company called Diebold.

Then, for the first time in history exit polls magically didn’t match the official vote count, especially in the key battleground state of Ohio. Strange. And rather than try to get to the bottom of it, everyone just threw up their hands and said, “golly, I guess exit polls just aren’t reliable anymore.” That conclusion, of course, flying in the face of a hundred plus years of data proving them to be incredibly accurate. Ever since then, media outlets have adjusted their exit polls to match the official vote tally once it is announced. There’s a strong trend in that adjustment, it’s called “red shift,” where the exit polls are to the left of the vote counts. Not fishy at all.

We learned nothing from Bush vs. Gore. And now history repeats itself, because following the 2017 election there have been countless stories trying to explain the inaccuracy of the exit polls. Some going so far as to exclaim 2016 the end of the exit poll. The supposition, flying in the face of all available evidence, being that the inaccuracy lies in the exit poll and not in the election results.

What did the exit polls look like in comparison to the 2016 presidential election results? Take a look for yourself:

And look at that, we just swung an election. You’ll notice that you don’t even have to shove all that hard, with a simple 5 point push in Trump’s favor, easily chalked up to statistical error, the electoral college is secured for the win.

All told, Trump flipped three states with a discrepancy between actual and exit polls greater than the margin of error. And if those ‘miracle’ flips with 5-6 point differences between the exit polls did not occur then Trump would not be President. Those three states are: North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Oh shit, I remember those states. That’s right, their the states Nunes went out of his way getting soundbytes ‘proving’ they weren’t compromised. Interesting… Very, very interesting.

The Law of Large Numbers

Quick math lesson, the law of large numbers is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.

i.e., you flip a coin 5 times and it wouldn’t be weird to get four heads and one tails, but if you flip a coin 50,000 times it would be very strange to get 40,000 heads.

Vote Sleuth shows on a chart, what the tallies would look like if you hacked an election according to the Law of Large Numbers.

In an unhacked election, the lines of the chart will stay parallel, in a hacked election they’ll cross.